FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The invention relates to a household appliance, in particular an electrically operated household appliance.
In household appliances, power is supplied to the electrical load or loads by mechanical actuators or control elements. The mechanical actuators or operating elements are located in the household appliance, so that the operator has to be at the location of the household appliance in order to actuate the operating elements. The operator therefore has to interrupt his current work and, if necessary, has to clean and to dry his hands. Furthermore, the actuation of household appliances often proves to be relatively troublesome for the disabled. A product for the rehabilitation sector is already known under the name "SICARE pilot" (available from the software vendor evosoft Softwarevertrieb GmbH, D-90411 Nuremberg/Germany), which includes a mobile device which converts spoken commands into signals. The signals are output by an infrared transmitter, for example for the control of television sets, video recorders, hi-fi systems, telephone and lighting, by radio transmitters, for example for the control of house doors, lifts, call and alarm systems, or by wire-bound interfaces, for example for the control of electrically driven wheelchairs and motor-adjustable beds. The known product, which is intended for physically disabled persons, permits the storage of a maximum of 64 commands. The mobile device transmits the command for the desired action, for example "television on" automatically to the appropriate device via the previously selected interface. Each individual instruction can address a number of devices at the same time. The known product is trained to the individual speech pattern of one person, and therefore implements speaker-dependent speech recognition. Ideally, other persons are not capable of generating signals which control the devices from spoken commands. In the known product, the speech recognition is implemented by predefined words (e.g. "house", "light", "four", "minus") which must be spoken in accordance with a menu tree having a number of branches, however it is possible for the individual words to be spoken at any desired time interval. If, because of an indisposition of the physically disabled person, the speech input is aborted prematurely, it is possible that individual words, which are, for example, generated by a radio or television set and which are provided in the branch of the menu tree, which is to be dealt with after the speech input was aborted, can cause signals to be generated which control one or more devices. Such an inadvertent control of one or more devices, for example a wheelchair, can endanger the physically disabled person.
The German patent document DE 38 03 220 discloses a household appliance having a program switching device. A phonetic control device is configured in such a way that code words or their speech pattern signals no longer called up or not called up for a long time are deleted from a speech pattern memory.
The European patent document EP 0 031 144 discloses a heating appliance having a device for recognizing speech and having a device for generating artificial speech signals. In this heating appliance, a first speech recognition step (m-1) is carried out, and is followed by a step (m-2), in which an artificial speech signal is produced, which is further followed by a second speech recognition step (m-3).